swanhart

Kickfire has announced (as of April 14th, 2008) record breaking results in the TPC-H(tm) Price/Performance category at 300GB and also in overall performance in the non-clustered category at 300GB.
You can find the official results here on the TPC(tm) (Transaction Processing Performance Council) website:
http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_price_perf_results.asp
http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_price_perf_results.asp?resulttype=noncluster

While the amazingly low price of the Kickfire Database Appliance 2400 will grab you (only about twice the price of a typical 4U MySQL database server) -- the amazing performance per watt is truly incredible. The 3RU Kickfire appliance used in the 300GB volume test consumes just 3RU of rack space and a measly 650watts of power.

To give an appropriate comparison, my home gaming PC contains an 800W power supply. Compared to other high performance database systems (comparison by wattage, not necessarily performance) that use tens (even hundreds) of thousands of watts, the Kickfire appliance is orders of magnitude more environmentally friendly.

Not only does it reduce the amount of physical space required, but it also reduces the costs of environmental control (cooling). It uses less manufacturing resources, is more portable between data centers and it requires less excess inventory (like spare hard disks) to maintain, all of which result in significant cost of maintenance savings.

This 'green' aspect is one of the major factors in my decision to join Kickfire, and I'm proud to be working for a company making such huge strides toward sustainable computing practices.

Full disclosure: I am a paid employee of Kickfire, Inc. The opinions expressed in my personal blog posts are my own and may not reflect those of the company. All facts and figures may be validated via the TPC website, and this blog does not represent an official posting of TPC-H data, or any other TPC related information.

Kickfire is a trademark of Kickfire, Inc.
TPCH, QphH and $/QphH are trademarks of the TPC. For additional information on the TPCH benchmark, please visit the Transaction Processing Performance Council's Web site at http://www.tpc.org/.